Under the program, known as the Liverpool Care Pathway, trusts, which oversee the finances of a group of hospitals, can deny food and hydration to dying patients. Between £12 and £20 million (US$20 – US$32.3 million) has already been paid out to almost two-thirds of NHS trusts that have “hit targets” in the program, reports the UK Telegraph.
The figures, obtained by the paper under the Freedom of Information Act, show that about 85-percent of trusts have now adopted the regime, branded as the NHS ‘Pathway to Death’ by critics.
According to the Daily Mail, some hospitals have been set on targets requiring between a third and two-thirds of all deaths should be on the LCP program. At many hospitals, more than 50-percent of all patients who died had been placed on the LCP program. In one case, the proportion of foreseeable deaths on the pathway was almost nine out of 10.
The scandal has rocked Britain
The LCP program was conceived as a set of procedures to ease the suffering in patients dying within hours or a few days. These involve the withdrawal from treatments the tending doctor felt were no longer needed, or would do more harm than good. The original protocols required patients, and if possible, their families, should be consulted first.
But a number of cases have now come up where patients’ families were never consulted, or even told that food and hydration was being denied to their loved ones.
In some cases, patients who were put on the pathway were never terminally ill and went on to fully recover.
Top UK doctor's chilling claim: The NHS kills off 130,000 elderly patients every year.
Professor says doctors use 'death pathway' to euthenasia of the elderly
Around 29 per cent of patients that die in hospital are on controversial 'care pathway'
NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday.
Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.
He claimed there was often a lack of clear evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway, a method of looking after terminally ill patients that is used in hospitals across the country.
It is designed to come into force when doctors believe it is impossible for a patient to recover and death is imminent.
There are around 450,000 deaths in Britain each year of people who are in hospital or under NHS care. Around 29 per cent – 130,000 – are of patients who were on the LCP.
Professor Pullicino claimed that far too often elderly patients who could live longer are placed on the LCP and it had now become an ‘assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway’.
He cited ‘pressure on beds and difficulty with nursing confused or difficult-to-manage elderly patients’ as factors.
Professor Pullicino revealed he had personally intervened to take a patient off the LCP who went on to be successfully treated.
He said this showed that claims they had hours or days left are ‘palpably false’.
In the example he revealed a 71-year-old who was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia and epilepsy was put on the LCP by a covering doctor on a weekend shift.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2161869/Top-doctors-chilling-claim-The-NHS-kills-130-000-elderly-patients-year.html#ixzz2GnUTrXgs
130,000 ~ you add that to the homicide statistics in UK and those bad boys have a really serious problem that makes even many African states look peaceful!